Like many people I was excited when the Rabbit R1 was announced and quickly bought one. Within minutes I could see it was a fairly useless device as shipped. I put it on the shelf with a vague notion that I would do something with it later.
A year later, I tried jailbreaking it, only to brick it. Back on the shelf it would go.
As Claude Code became more proficient, I decided to try again. Claude’s eagerness was just the quality I needed to keep at it. I could try anything at all without any complaints from my companion.
I worked on it an entire weekend, surprised at how long it took. Eventually I was able to get Cipher OS running on it. However there were 2 major flaws: the camera motor control no longer worked and the power button would kill the touch screen.
I took another weekend and finally hacked together some patches that would allow me to work the camera and bypass the power-off/touchscreen death cycle.
Once these 2 things were working, I was able to put the rabbit into use as a “sentinel” to capture video and image footage of my roasting coffee beans (the subject of an upcoming post).
I have conflicting feelings about the rabbit. The form factor fits the hand nicely (it’s pleasant to hold) but the hardware is too puny to do any kind of real work.
Anyway, this code is just for the rabbit r1 functionailty, it case it helps anyone.